Forum:Medarot 5 fan translation proposal
If any of you have rom hacking and programming skills, I would be willing to help translate for a fan translation of Medarot 5. As I'm not fluent in the language and I only know basic grammar, I could not translate the whole thing. But, I could help with a fair bit of the dialogue and the menus. Even putting out a partial translation would be better than nothing. The game is really quite colourful and funny, and I think it's a shame that it's never been translated. I have no programming skills so I can not help in that area. There will be some challenges: 8-bit games have limited space in the hex editor for text. Whole sentences can be written in Japanese in the space it takes to write a few words in English. Often, translations are hindered by having to compress the dialogue and other text. If any of you are interested leave a message here or on my talk page.--Icedolphin (talk) 05:57, April 19, 2013 (UTC) :I agree! Sadly I don't have any programming skills either, so I'm in the exact same boat as you. If it was just a matter of finding the text in a hex editor and replacing it with English, I would have made one already... *sigh* :One problem M5 has is that English letters aren't part of the normal text table. It uses a modifier byte (BF) and then reads the byte after that to determine the letter... (BF00 is A, BF01 is B, etc. Only capitals, no lowercase.) So while the English letters are usable, they actually take up twice as much space as the normal Japanese, which is indeed a problem. The game also has two fonts - One for normal dialogue (which includes English and kanji) and one for the names above dialogue boxes (which doesn't). That's also ignoring the fact that stuff like "Koishimaru" isn't going to fit into the 8-character limit for most things. Medarot and part names are especially bad for this. :/ :The fonts are modifiable in a tile editor (they aren't compressed), but yeah, there's a lot of work we'd need to do even if we wanted to make a crappy partial translation patch. A lot of menu and battle text is stored in the form of compressed graphics too, which might prove difficult to edit. :I'd be happy to help out if it gets off the ground though. XD I have a bunch of notes on where text is stored in the ROM and such, but I need to type them up before I can post them. ~ Kimbles (talk) 14:24, April 19, 2013 (UTC) I posted some mock-ups here. They're only made in image editing software though. Icedolphin (talk) 19:25, April 19, 2013 (UTC) :Hmm. That would require changing the font to be variable-width, which might be hard to do for a GBC game. :/ It does look really nice though, and it'd probably be necessary if we want to fit in all the long names and such. Three lines of text per box is a bit much though. XD :Here are the text addresses I was able to find: Link. I'll post the text table file there once I finish filling in the rest of the kanji. :D ~ Kimbles (talk) 22:31, April 19, 2013 (UTC) :I just squished in three lines of text so it would fit in a single image. In reality we'd probably only be able to fit around 1.5 sentences of text.Icedolphin (talk) 04:57, April 20, 2013 (UTC) :If this ever takes off, I guess I could work on the script and you could do the Medarot and Parts names? Personally, I find most Part names are an Engrishy mess. How strong is your Japanese? We could work together on the script, some of the lines are easy to understand in Japanese, but hard to make them not sound awkward in English.Icedolphin (talk) 07:33, April 24, 2013 (UTC) Category:Forums